Tonight my wife and I went to a screening of Juno, which is a movie that will hit theatres later this month in wider circulation. We enjoyed seeing the movie and really enjoy the bonuses of seeing a movie before it hits national theatres. For Juno we got free t-shirts and of course did not have to pay to see the movie. The added bonus was that the theatre validated my parking, that saved me $8 more.
I did enjoy the movie but there are a couple of minor points I found puzzling. First, the delay that you expect between a funny moment and the next bits of dialogue were absent. This combined with loud laughers and you miss dialogue. This was a trend throughout the movie. I am not sure if the director was unaware of what scenes were funny and didn't prepare any pause. Regardless, it was still enjoyable to watch but did take away some of the film as you missed dialogue.
The second point is in regards to the soundtrack. With this movie and with other recent movies of its kind there are several songs by the same artist. This is not uncommon, but I have noticed that more movies are starting to just pick a handful of artists and stick with them throughout the soundtrack. This was great for The Darjeeling Limited, but for Juno the person picking the songs didn't do a great job. It was like they had just got into listening to Kimya Dawson and stuck her music in whenever they could. The issue I have with this is that she is off key in her songs, and choosing her doesn't diversify the sound enough for me to enjoy. There was one point in the movie right after hearing the third song by Ms. Dawson that I leaned to my wife and said why aren't they playing Cat Power yet. Coincidently, the next song was Cat Power. My point is that I could have thrown this soundtrack together in less than 20 minutes, it was predictable. They could have easily took out Kimya Dawson in a few places and replaced her with The Magnetic Fields or Aimee Mann.
The nice surprise in regards to music was that there was discussion about how good the Sonic Youth cover of Superstar is. Coincidently, I have found myself listening to the Carpenters lately and was delighted to see this reference.